Tales from Ovid. Twenty-four Passages from the Metamorphoses.

Limited first edition. 8vo. Pp. [2], xi, 264, [14 (blank)]. Quarter-bound grey cloth over olive-green paper boards, with printed rust-red paper label to spine; rust-red endpapers. Five-page Introduction by the Author. Glossary of Names and Places to rear. Copy no. 273 of 300 copies offered for sale, and signed by Hughes on the limitation page. An additional 10 copies, numbered I-X, were reserved for the author. Specially bound by Smith Settle in Otley, West Yorkshire. Housed in a matching two-tone slipcase. Preceded by the 1997 hardcover trade edition, which was issued on May 5th, 1997.

Winner of the 1997 Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Twenty-four passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses translated from the Latin into clear, emphatic English verse, by the Poet Laureate. Like his subsequent Birthday Letters (1998), a 'dramaturgy of healing' for Hughes evident in its selection, arrangement, and adaptation of Ovid's myths in which "the all-too-human victim stumbles out into the mythic arena and is transformed," as per his introduction. "Tales from Ovid is the best thing Hughes has done. It will live as one of the great works of this century." –Michael Hofmann, The Times

[Keith Sagar, Ted Hughes: A Bibliographical Supplement 1996–2013, A115]